Tag Archives: politics

Costs and Aggregated Statistics

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A Just the News news writer wrote that [p]ositive US economic indicators have been left out of much of the mainstream media’s reporting on the state of the economy.

He’s right—the mainstream media really is that mendaciously biased. His claim, though, also is wholly irrelevant in the present election season.

All those economically favorable data that the news media studiously ignores are aggregated data; they refer to the nation and not to any particular individual, not even to any small groups of people in local communities.

Folks don’t care that, as a nation, inflation is down sharply from the Biden years or the nation’s median household income has risen to nearly $87,500. Who is this Mr/Ms Median Household person, anyway? Has anyone actually met him or her? Nor do folks care that the nation‘s jobs data are favorable.

What an individual—a voter—cares about is that he’s personally paying gas prices that are up 30-40 percent over the pre-Biden years; he, the trucker, is personally paying diesel prices that are up nearly double; her grocery bills at the local grocery store are up 40-50 percent; his/her income—what he or she gets in an actual take home paycheck—doesn’t stretch to pay those higher costs. It’s not that he notices that his take home pay isn’t growing enough to keep up with inflation—generally he doesn’t. Nor does he need to, what he sees is that his paycheck no longer covers his gas, groceries, utility bills, and on and on. That’s if the individual has a job at all, which personal datum is invisible in those aggregated statistics. He’s just a depersoned number in the collection of labor statistics.

What are politicians, especially Republican politicians, going to do about that? This is what, so far.

Republicans are going to be swept into oblivion next month if they don’t stop hiding under their desks avoiding these simple facts and get out among their constituents—diners, rec centers, town halls, letters to local editors, interviews on local television and radio stations—and say, in so many words, what their particular policies are that will address their constituents’ particular cost of living concerns.

Being specific is the bane of politicians, exposing them as specifics do, to broad criticism and sharp opprobrium. It’s time now, though, for Republicans to find some backbone and be specific, which, as a happy side effect, would let them point out the failure of their opponents to have any sort of plan for these ills other than that they’re not Trump and they’re not Republicans.

AI and Polling

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A letter-writer in Tuesday’s WSJ Letters section thinks he sees a use for AI in improving the quality of political polls, which for the last several years have been badly off the mark both in prediction election winners and in predicting the margins of victory when they did get the winner right.

He’s sort of right, and he’s wrong.

It [AI] can help researchers reach a more representative mix of people, examine results faster and track changes in opinion more often.

AI can certainly speed up “examinations” of results if it’s properly trained on truly balanced techniques. That, though, requires humans being diligent about scrubbing as much as possible their own biases, with those humans involved in the training coming from a variety of political bents so as to counterbalance remaining biases. This is a requirement too often honored in the lack.

Additionally, researchers already know how to reach a more representative sample. However, they’ve been, instead, deliberately oversampling one party over others in order to reach a predetermined outcome. AI will not address that; it cannot correct it if it could address it.

Finally, there’s not much need to track opinion changes more frequently than is already done; most of us already have polling fatigue and are not interested in being confronted by even more polls, even if we just decline to participate.

In the end, all AI is likely to do, at least until we get better trained human oversight, is speed up the rate at which the polls get the politics wrong.

A Faux Angst

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There is growing upset over the CDC having not yet opened its ordering process for States to order “their” supplies of Wuhan Virus vaccines for children.

It’s a falsely created upset. Leave aside the minor matter that it’s difficult to predict when the right time in the year is to administer a Covid booster shot, former CDC leaders said.

Reasonably healthy children, even sick ones with comorbidities extant, don’t need vaccine: between about six months old and pubescence, they are already immune to the virus. Before six months, their immune systems are not established, so the vaccine would do those babies no good, and it could be dangerous for them.

Here, though, is this, from Dr Demetre Daskalakis, formerly in charge of overseeing CDC’s immunization efforts:

Even if there’s a little delay, that’s creating a disparity[.]

It’s not fair. The angst has nothing to do with any actual need, only to do with equity. Some who don’t need the vaccine are getting it, so everyone who doesn’t need the vaccine should get it.

“Parliamentary Heresy”

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In his Tuesday FoxNews article on two Progressive-Democrats voting in favor of a Republican procedure to advance a bill against the express wishes of Party leadership, Chad Pergram had this comment:

The duo [Congressmen Jared Golden (D, M) and Marie Gluesenkamp Perez (D, WA)] committed something close to a parliamentary heresy, handing the GOP the necessary votes on a procedural matter to unlock the floor for the majority.
Republicans lacked the votes to do it on their own—had Golden and Gluesenkamp not intervened.

Couple things on this. One is that our Congress is not a Parliament where party discipline is a requirement and MPs voting against their leadership is both rare and serious enough to lead directly to the fall of the government. No member of the American Congress is bound to vote the way any party leadership demands. Indeed, Congressmen voting against their party’s leadership has occurred ever since there were political parties in the US—what Washington referred to as factions. Such contrary votes only recently include two Progressive-Democrat Senators voting against a Party budget bill and moving against an effort to get rid of the filibuster.

That these two Progressive-Democrats also didn’t advise Party leadership in advance of their intention was certainly rude, but that’s hardly heresy, Parliamentary or otherwise. I suggest on this, that they gave no heads up because their Party boss, Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D, NY), because he is so deeply in the pocket of Party’s Left and its DSA members that he couldn’t be expected to listen to their reasons.

The other thing is that second paragraph in the cite. Republicans lacked the vote because some Republican Congressmen were voting against Republican party leadership by voting against that same procedural matter. This, though, seems no parliamentary heresy in Pergram’s eyes, he made no mention of the dastardly nature of those contrary votes.

Go figure.

Revisionist History and Political CYA

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Progressive-Democratic Party candidate for Congress from Michigan’s 7th Congressional District William Lawrence has been busily deleting politically inconvenient social media posts he’s made in the past. The smaller problem is that his deletions are nothing other than a coward’s attempt to revise his history. It’s the smaller problem because such revisionism is widely spread and all too common, even though that in no way legitimizes the misbehavior.

The larger problem here concerns those deletions and his rationalization of them. The deletions include posts pushing for such things as

police and prison abolition, called for nationalizing fossil-fuel companies to end their production, attacked moderate Democrats, and argued for a “fundamental overhaul” of the Constitution.
…
“f**k” the nuclear-family home and calling it an “isolating, individualistic, violent way of organizing society,” envisioning “a world of free and open migration,” and calling to “Abolish the Senate.”

That’s about as un-American as it gets. His rationalization, though….

Lawrence said that he currently does not support defunding the police or open borders despite what his earlier posts suggested.
“Like many millennials, I’ve done a lot of thinking out loud on the internet[.]”

That’s an illustration of Lawrence’s dishonesty. He spoke from his heart in those since-deleted posts. His deletions and his rationalizations are nothing more than him covering his political behind. What concrete actions has he taken, after all, to illustrate, if not demonstrate, his alleged evolution of his thinking?